A full moon, a jar of blue lake water, a splash in a glass of whiskey — Gerry Stewart’s “This Could Be the Night” moves in the small, charged space between private ritual and longing. The speaker gathers moonlight-tinged water and keeps it in preserve jars, later slipping some into a lover’s drink while watching his face for a sign. The central idea is less about whether the night delivers than about the hope that it might: the poem treats desire as something that can be stored, timed, and released, but never fully controlled.
From the opening, the poem fuses the domestic and the cosmic. “Each time the moon is ripe” gives the moon a fruit-like fullness, as if the sky itself comes to harvest. The speaker scoops “blue water from the lake” and stores it “in preserve jars,” using a kitchen method to keep wild, lunar magic shelf-stable. The phrase “its magic pressed to my ear” suggests both a child-like listening for the sea in a shell and an adult’s private act of faith: she literally holds the mystery close. This opening stanza establishes the poem’s tone — quiet, deliberate, and slightly uncanny — without announcing a grand event.
The second stanza shifts into the shared moment the ritual has been waiting for. The line break in “On nights like this I” isolates the “I” for a beat, giving the speaker a small surge of agency before she continues: “spill some in your whiskey.” The act is intimate and a little sly, a charm delivered in an ordinary drink. The next images are bare but sensuous: she smiles at “your eyes, bright / moist lips,” the line break allowing “bright” to hover before it attaches to lips as much as eyes. Then the title phrase appears as an internal thought, “This could be the night,” not spoken aloud. That small distinction matters: the speaker is trying to conjure something through belief, but the word “could” keeps the outcome open and vulnerable.
Structurally, the poem has no fixed rhyme scheme, yet it moves with a careful rhythm of expectation and release. Its short lines create pauses that mimic held breath, especially around the enjambments in the second stanza. Water runs through the whole piece — lake, whiskey, moist lips — as if emotion follows the same rise and ebb as a shoreline. The final stanza breathes differently. “Later at dawn we watch the moon / curl down the sky, the lake / pull back from the shore.” The verbs “curl” and “pull back” are quiet and physical, completing the night’s arc from fullness to ebb. “We watch” is significant: whatever did or did not happen, the two are now together at the window, sharing the aftermath. But the lake drawing away from the shore hints at recession, the spell’s energy receding with the moon. Morning restores the natural order, and the night’s possibility becomes memory.
What makes “This Could Be the Night” significant is its restraint. It does not tell us whether the speaker’s hope was fulfilled. Instead, it locates a profound emotional truth in a small, unseen practice: the way people bottle up hope, wait for the right conditions, and risk offering it to someone else. The ripe moon, the lake water, and the whiskey create a layered image of longing as both natural and social — wild water preserved at home, then poured into a drink. The poem dignifies that quiet hoping. It suggests that a night can be significant not because of what happens, but because of the way a person watches, waits, and dares to think it might. By closing on withdrawal rather than climax, Stewart leaves the title’s “could be” suspended, like water kept in a jar, still full of magic precisely because it has not been spent.